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The title Everyday Shooter isn't just special because it's a pretty good game, blending Geometry Wars-like gameplay with great music. It's also the winner of numerous accolades from last year's Independent Games Festival, and as of this week it will be headlining on the PlayStation Store. "The $10 game may be coming into a market clogged with dual-analog shooters, but I don't think it will have a hard time fitting in. 'Some days I would spend all day tweaking a level, sleep for a few hours, and then go back and tweak some more,' Mak told me at E3. 'The challenges I faced in this game were creative, not technical.' The sense that someone slaved over this across many, many sleepless nights comes through pretty clearly. This is one to watch, and keep the name Jonathan Mak in your head. I doubt this will be the last thing we see from him." For more on the background of this unique title Gamasutra interviewed Mak, the game's sole creator, prior to the IGF last year.

...for all the egregious mistakes they've made in marketing the PS3, they're doing one thing that neither Nintendo nor Microsoft (XNA aside) has really managed: luring fantastic independent and artistic game developers onto the platform. Titles like Everyday Shooter, Jenova Chen's flOw, and even stuff like Calling All Cars are really making a PS3 a temptation, as absurd as it seems to spend $400 on a system to play $5 games on. Microsoft took some good initial steps with games like Eets and Alien Hominid, but they've slipped dramatically since then; more and more it's looking like the PS3 will be the primary platform for fans of the indie scene.

Actually, it may be silly, but it makes sense, even from the point of view of the consumer.If there is a large and diverse catalogue of on-loine games to keep me interested, along with a few disk-only titles, then the lower cost of the on-line titles means I'll either:

a) spend the same exact amount of money on more games

b) spend less money overall on games (since the on-line titles are "cheaper", in the bargain-bin range usually)

Heck, for the consumer, if they end up following choice "b", they might even sp

It does feel silly, but I have not purchased a single disc title for my PS3. Yet I've had as many hours enjoyment with it as I have my Wii, so I have no regrets...

Admittedly, I'd likely not have purchased the system (yet, anyway) if I didn't have an HDTV, if it didn't play BluRay movies, if there weren't any announced exclusives that I wanted, and if it didn't upscale PS2 content. However I think that Nintendo is really missing the boat. Platform specific content can be downloadable. There's no reason to make us schlep to the store and pay over $30 for what are pretty basic games. Now if only Sony can stop shooting themselves in the foot for long enough that people actually get a chance to notice the system's positives...

However I think that Nintendo is really missing the boat. Platform specific content can be downloadable. There's no reason to make us schlep to the store and pay over $30 for what are pretty basic games.

In order to download games, you need to be able to store them somewhere. The Wii has 512MB of internal flash storage, which is not very much when you consider that all of your VC downloads and game saves have to be stored there (the SD card slot is only for archival purposes, as you can't save games or run

I think that long-term the value proposition is probably higher on the PS3 than the Wii due to the ability to provide these downloadable games, and that Nintendo will eventually have to either come out with a USB hard drive add-on, come out with Wii2, or miss the boat with downloadable content.

How fast is the internet? Seriously, it took me 5 minutes to download Paper Mario over DSL... that's, what, 50MB? Do I really want to start downloading 4GB titles? Not a chance. Music is exceptable with download, movies are GETTING THERE (if only because they can be highly compressed), video games, whose content is already highly compressed to begin with, aren't going to be exceptable for download for a long time, unless you're talking all-night downloads. I don't know if games ever will, frankly. Movies an

I know not many places have this yet, but it's expanding...I've got 20Mbit down... I routinely get 1.8MB/second from the playstation store. If I wanted to spend $10/month more I could have 50MB/second. 4GB for a game download is no big deal. Especially when the game downloads in the background while you're playing another game. Admittedly if I had to watch Mario hit ? blocks while I was waiting it would be a different story...

In order to download games, you need to be able to store them somewhere. The Wii has 512MB of internal flash storage, which is not very much when you consider that all of your VC downloads and game saves have to be stored there (the SD card slot is only for archival purposes, as you can't save games or run VC titles off of an SD card). Had Nintendo included a hard drive, they never would've been able to hit their $250 price tag.

Yeah, any also some really simple games like high stake poker are 316mb which is

Nah, it shouldn't feel terribly silly.... I've bought a few PS3 titles, but I still love the games like Super Stardust and Flow. Usually if there's a non-EA port, I generally try the PS3 first, and if it handles well (I love the Sixaxis, so sue me), I generally don't bother with the 360 version (even with DLC potential for it... because besides Oblivion, most DLC is not all that special to me...)I like the 360, and frequently play games on it as well (I am addicted to Burnout, because it makes me feel bet

And, of course, the best part is that you can still get DLC for the PS3. The PS3 is just warming up to DLC, but it does have it... Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band have plans for downloadable songs, for example.

I'm not really sure if titles published by Sony can really count as 'indie'. If the platform was open to the extent that any indie had a shot at getting a game on the service, then they'd have something... at this point Sony doesn't even have a public devkit equivalent to MS's XNA (unless you count using the crippled multimedia in PS3 Linux).flOw and Everyday Shooter are great, but they're not titles that were 'lured' onto the platform, unless handing large stacks of money to indie developers to convince th

at this point Sony doesn't even have a public devkit equivalent to MS's XNA (unless you count using the crippled multimedia in PS3 Linux).

I think the intended use case is that you finish developing a game for the Windows or Linux platform, and it uses OpenGL and OpenAL, and then you approach Sony and a dozen publishers about getting the game ported to PS3.

...for all the egregious mistakes they've made in marketing the PS3, they're doing one thing that neither Nintendo nor Microsoft (XNA aside) has really managed: luring fantastic independent and artistic game developers onto the platform.

(XNA aside)... Isn't that a pretty big caveat, seeing as that's exactly the point of XNA? Nothing has come to fruition yet, but I think we'll be seeing homebrew games coming to the public at some point. Still, you're point about a lack of original titles is well made, if slightly exaggerated (there have been a number of original games released to Live).

Do you wonder why you see a lot of ports and casual games on Xbox live arcade? Let's list the top ten Arcade titles:

More seriously, why do people say "intellectual property" when they mean only "intellectual resources"? Overuse of "intellectual property" connotes [vlsm.org] the support of expanded property rights (that is, powers of exclusion) over intellectual resources.

Well if you ever do get a PS3, you should find comfort with Super Stardust HD. IMO it's better than Geometry Wars and I've played both. There are also Blast Factor and Nucleus, but neither of those compares to SSHD.

It has an all guitar sound track playing, then overlaid on top of the sound track are guitar cords that play due to your different actions. Killing an enemy will play a cord, pickup up a power up, shooting bigger enemies, or any other action will play a cord. The desired result (i believe) is a feeling that you are making "music" while shooting things, but it looks like it often comes out as a very convoluted mash-up of sounds which isn't always pleasant.

Any people from Melbourne, Australia who want to try this game out can go to the ACMI Cetre (free Video Game Art Gallery) at Federation Square where Everyday Shooter is currently on display for anyone to play (along with many other indy titles [Go Aquaria Woo!].
Its very good, a cross between Rez and Smash TV but instead of Techno its Acoustic Guitars.